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Catholicism Week 17
Prayer and Life in the Spirit – Part 1
Bishop begins this week speaking of prayer as a deep and
profound encounter with God. So…many times we as human beings
living in a busy and noisy world are not quite ready in a moment’s
notice to enter into such a sacred encounter, and certain prayers
can help us make that transition. Thomas Merton taught many
believers through his writings that the Our Father and Hail Mary
are very effective prayers to lead us into deeper prayer. My mind
seems to always be going, and I believe it is true that prayer like
the Jesus Prayer can calm the mind and bring us to a point of
entering into a communion with God Himself. Bishop believes that we
may not realize it, but we are praying all the time in one form or
another, singing, dancing, reading sacred text, reciting scripture
and religious poems, processing, keeping silence, all have been and
are today forms of prayer.
1 Thessalonians 5:16–18 (RSV2CE) 16 Rejoice always, 17 pray
constantly, 18 give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the
will of God in Christ Jesus for you.
But what is it that links all of these together, St. John of
Damascus proclaimed prayer was the raising of the heart and the
mind up to God? Then Bishop immediately takes us into one of the
most beautiful structures on the face of the earth, the Saint
Chapelle in Paris, France built by King Louis IX as a reliquary for
Jesus’ crown of thorns. Even his video of the place takes my breath
away. As Bishop stands in the center of this sacred space, he
claims to feel the energy coming from God through those massive
stained glass windows into that place, embracing the electricity
generated by our intense longing for God, and the merging of the
two, that is what Bishop calls true prayer. I would love to go
there some day. It reminds me of this Psalm.
Psalm 42:7–8 (RSV2CE) 7 Deep calls to deep at the thunder of
your cataracts (powerful waterfalls); all your waves and your
billows have gone over me. 8 By day the Lord commands his steadfast
love; and at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my
life.
We are all of us born with an insatiable desire to touch in some
way the transcendence of our Creator and communicate with Him with
deep love. And simultaneously we are somehow aware that God is
trying to break through our everyday chaos and reveal to us His
very presence in our lives. Bishop’s intent in this video is to
uncover the essence, the very nature of prayer, and right on cue he
takes us to the hustle and bustle of Times Square in New York City.
Bishop wants to connect us with someone who came from such a place
as this, to teach us about the very core of Catholic prayer. Many
of us might think of prayer as quiet nuns praying from their small
simple cells in far away convents, or monks chanting through the
halls of ancient monasteries. Thomas Merton came from Manhattan and
right in the middle of the ever increasing secular mid-twentieth
century America he was largely responsible for recapturing Catholic
mystical contemplation and prayer that had been absent for some
time.
Thomas was born in 1915 in southern France to parents who had
met in art school in Paris, he was from New Zealand and she from
America. His mother died when Thomas was just six, and he wandered
the world with his painter father, living in places like England,
France, Bermuda, and New York. At sixteen in boarding school in
England, his father died and suddenly he was all alone in this
world…just take that in for a moment. As a freshman a Cambridge,
his life was out of control, too much of everything and he fathered
a child that eventually was the reason he was sent away to America.
He ended up in Columbia University in New York that he described as
a great sooty factory. He was a well known figure on campus,
becoming the editor of a college paper, The Jester, and most
impacted by a professor of Shakespeare, Martin Van Doran. He became
involved with a tight circle of intellectuals but continued to be
lost in a secular world seeking the true meaning of life and
experiencing all the pleasures that life had to offer.
Romans 1:28–31 (RSV2CE) 28 And since they did not see fit to
acknowledge God, God gave them up to a base mind and to improper
conduct. 29 They were filled with all manner of wickedness, evil,
covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit,
malignity, they are gossips, 30 slanderers, haters of God,
insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to
parents, 31 foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.
Don’t ever give up on the grace of God to intervene in the lives
of those we love. One day walking down 5th Avenue he entered a book
store and was drawn to a book, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy by
a French author and thought it might be helpful with a course he
was taking on French poetry. He bought it and opened it up only to
find it was officially approved for printing by the Catholic
Church. He almost threw it out the window of the train he was on.
He would later say that by a special grace he read the book anyway,
and it changed his life completely. I love that fact that there is
Bishop standing on 5th Avenue in front of where that book store
used to be. That is why I love this series so much. He takes us to
Cambridge, and then to Columbia University and on to 5th Avenue,
and you begin to feel like you know Thomas Merton as we join his
journey into God.
Thomas was very moved by the Catholic philosophical argument for
the existence of God that found in the book, dating all the way
back to medieval ages. This was the first book he had read that
appealed to both his intellect and touched his spirit in a very
real way. The idea that fascinated him the most was the
understanding that God does not exist as a being in the same way
that all of creation does, God is life itself, God is the sheer act
of “being” itself, and that thought became the focus and pursuit of
his life from that day forward. He attended a few Protestant
churches, his mother was a Quaker, and was not very impressed. But
one Sunday morning, he had an intense desire to attend Mass, talk
about Jesus getting into your boat, and Thomas entered a Catholic
church on the Upper West Side of New York, The Church of Corpus
Christie, guess what feast day this is today?
Romans 8:28 (RSV2CE) 28 We know that in everything God works for
good with those who love him, who are called according to his
purpose.
He felt like he had entered a whole new world, a world he had no
idea existed. Even afterward while eating at grungy little diner
nearby, he felt like he was dining in the Elysian Fields, a sort of
heaven that he had studied about in Greek Mythology. Think of all
the grace that God is pouring out to this lost soul among the
millions in New York City.
Luke 15:3–7 (RSV2CE) 3 So he told them this parable: 4 “What man
of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them, does
not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one
which is lost, until he finds it? 5 And when he has found it, he
lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. 6 And when he comes home, he
calls together his friends and his neighbors, saying to them,
‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost.’ 7 Just
so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner
who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no
repentance.
Next we are walking down 6th Avenue with Bishop as he recalls
Merton walking with a friend asking Thomas what he wanted to do
with his life, his answer was to be a good Catholic. But his friend
challenged Thomas to set his goals higher than that, he should want
to be a saint. He researched some religious orders and was drawn to
the Franciscans, only to be rejected because of his checkered past.
Finally, a friend from Columbia suggested he go on retreat during
Holy Week to a Trappist monastery in Kentucky, The Abbey of Our
Lady of Gethsemane. Just few days after Pearl Harbor, he entered
the monastery beginning a twenty-seven-year career as a monk, poet,
and spiritual writer utterly absorbed in a life of prayer and
adoration of Our Lord.
Thomas Merton OCSO (January 31, 1915 – December 10, 1968) was an
American Trappist monk, writer, theologian, mystic, poet, social
activist, and scholar of comparative religion. On May 26, 1949, he
was ordained to the priesthood and given the name Father Louis.
Merton wrote more than 70 books, mostly on spirituality, social
justice and a quiet pacifism, as well as scores of essays and
reviews. Among Merton's most enduring works is his bestselling
autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), which sent scores
of World War II veterans, students, and even teenagers flocking to
monasteries across the US, and was also featured in National
Review's list of the 100 best non-fiction books of the century.
Merton was a keen proponent of interfaith understanding. He
pioneered dialogue with prominent Asian spiritual figures,
including the Dalai Lama, the Japanese writer D. T. Suzuki,
the Thai Buddhist monk Buddhadasa, and the Vietnamese monk Thich
Nhat Hanh, and authored books on Zen Buddhism, Confucianism and
Taoism. Wikipedia 2019.
Suddenly we are not in New York anymore, but instead looking a
quaint café in the heart of Segovia, Spain. I love this stuff, he
takes us to the city where the tomb resides of the spiritual master
that Merton fell in love with from the 16th century, St. John of
the Cross. And guess who the main influence on John back in the
1500s, none other than Teresa of Avila. Aren’t you glad you came to
class on Corpus Christi Sunday, at the church of St. Teresa of
Avila. John was moved by the encouragement of Teresa to initiate
necessary reform that would be bring his religious order back to
its spiritual roots, and of course he made some enemies among his
brothers in the process. His religious brothers finally had enough
of his reform and arrested him and imprisoned in Toledo Spain, in
the local monastery there. They put him in a small cell, and only
let him out long enough to physically beat him and put right back
in the cell. In the long hours and days of solitude John began to
construct in his heart and mind some of the most beautiful Spanish
poetry every written, and through those writings ultimately to take
Catholic mysticism to a new height as John described his intimate
union with Christ in that hopeless place for nearly nine months. He
finally made his escape over a very high wall as he was able to
lower himself to the street below. Through those difficult nine
months John described three great caverns that he and all human
beings possess. They are limitless in their capacity and depth,
they are the intellect, the cavern of the will and the cavern of
all feeling. They have no limit because they are created by God, so
the mind or intellect wants to know everything about everything,
and the mind cannot rest until it finds the limitless mind of God.
The will craves the ultimate good, and once again can only come to
rest in the limitless goodness that God is. Our feelings ache with
an overpowering longing for the someone who can fulfill all our
feelings, and our Creator is the only one able to do that. To try
and fill all three of these caverns with the stuff that this world
has to offer, only leads us to all kinds of additions, driving us
to crave more and more of all the “things” that will never satisfy.
Or we try and deny the caverns even exist, covering them over as
best as we can, living only on the surface of what this life has to
offer. Never committing to anything, and distrustful of everything,
we simply exist, never living life to its fullest.
All the spiritual giants of the Catholic tradition speak of a
purging that must take place in our lives to rid of us of all our
false gods, idols trying to take the place of God. John of the
Cross calls this two step purging of our inner life the Dark Night
of the Senses, and the Dark Night of the Soul. And we will leave
that right there until next week.
